Tag: policy

Pushback: Judge rules that libel suit against two black professors for slandering white real estate assessor can proceed

12:38 pm

Mott (l) and Connolly, eager to defame whites
Mott (l) and Connolly, eager to use race to
defame an innocent white man

Bring a gun to a knife fight: A U.S. district judge on August 2, 2023 ruled [pdf] that the defamation lawsuit of real estate assessor Shane Lanham against two black Johns Hopkins professors can now proceed.

And boy, does Lanhan stand a good chance of winning. This is a followup of an earlier blacklist story from February. The two professors, Nathan Connolly and Shani Mott, had publicly accused Lanham on national television of being a bigot because they had not liked the value he placed on their house. As I wrote then:

This story began when Connolly and Mott asked Lanham (who is white) and his company, 20/20 Valuations, to appraise their house. When they were unhappy with his appraisal, they decided to get another appraisal, but this time do what they themselves called a ““whitewashing experiment.” For the second appraisal they removed all evidence that a black family owned the house, to the extent of having a white friend present himself as the owner instead. The second appraisal, done months later, came up with a higher price.
» Read more

18 comments

South Korea’s KARI space agency releases new images taken by its Danuri lunar orbiter

10:02 am

To celebrate the anniversary of its launch, South Korea’s KARI space agency today released new images taken by its Danuri lunar orbiter.

Images include views of Reiner Gamma, a so-called swirl, which features a localized magnetic field and marks a bright spot within the Oceanus Procellarum region. Another shows shadows inside Amundsen Crater, close to the lunar south pole and a potential landing site for NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, which is slated to put astronauts on the moon in late 2025.

Another southern feature captured by Danuri is Drygalski Crater, showing the central peak inside the impact crater.

0 comments

ESA official confirms first Ariane-6 launch will not occur until 2024

9:45 am

The head of ESA yesterday confirmed what had been known since May, that the first test flight of its Ariane-6 rocket will not take place this year but will be delayed until 2024.

In an update on the Ariane 6 program also posted Tuesday, the ESA said that it could not complete a short hot firing test — which mimics the environment in space to provide data to operators — of Ariane’s Vulcain 2.1 engine system in a July attempt, with plans to try again on August 29.

Aschbacher said the tentative plan is to carry out a long hot fire test of the assembled core stage and engine on September 26 at the agency’s spaceport in French Guiana. If those tests are successful, it should then be possible to set a more precise timeline for getting the rocket system ready for launch next year.

It seems the inability of engineers to complete that July engine test — which ESA officials claimed was because they simply ran out of time — added at least a six-week delay to the entire program.

There delays leave Europe without any large rocket to launch payloads, and has forced its various governments to hire SpaceX to get those payloads into space.

0 comments

NASA engineers still struggling to understand why Orion’s heat shield ablated so much

9:10 am

NASA engineers still do not understand why the heat shield on its Orion capsule ablated as it did during its return to Earth on the first unmanned Artemis-1 mission.

The agency is still running tests. It also expressed confidence that the issue will not delay the Artemis-2 mission, the first intended to carry humans on SLS and in Orion and still scheduled for late 2024.

At the same time, agency officials hinted that the third Artemis mission, which has always been planned as putting humans on the Moon for the first time since Apollo, might not achieve that goal. It is still not clear whether the mission’s lunar spacesuits as well as SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander will be ready on time. The latter is facing serious regulatory problems imposed by the Biden administration that is generally preventing it from flight testing the spacecraft.

That second Artemis mission, the first planned to carry humans, is one that actually at present carries the most risk. It will not only use a heat shield that at present engineers do not entirely understand, it will be the first Orion capsule to have the environmental systems necessary for its human cargo. NASA is putting humans on the first test flight of those systems.

5 comments

China’s Long March 2C rocket launches “disaster reduction” satellite

7:30 pm

China today used its Long March 2C rocket to place what it called a “disaster reduction” satellite into orbit, launching from its Taiyuan spaceport in the interior of China.

No other information was released, including whether the rocket’s lower stages landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

54 SpaceX
32 China
10 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
6 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 62 to 32, and the entire world combined 62 to 53, while SpaceX by itself still leads the world (excluding American companies) 54 to 53.

2 comments

NOAA lifts many restrictions on the release of commercial Earth observation images

3:09 pm

As part of a 2020 revision by Commerce to reduce regulations on satellites that monitor the Earth, NOAA has now lifted many of the restrictions it placed on the release of high resolution commercial Earth observation images.

NOAA said it lifted 39 restrictions on an unspecified number of licenses. Those restrictions include a reduction of global imaging restrictions for certain imaging modes and removal of restrictions on non-Earth imaging and rapid revisit. It also removed all temporary conditions on X-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery.

One of the companies that benefits from the removal of the conditions is SAR imaging company Umbra. The company announced Aug. 7 that, with the removal of the conditions, it can now offer SAR images to customers at a resolution of 16 centimeters, compared to no better than 25 centimeters under the old license conditions. “This means that we are finally able to offer customers the highest resolution images that our satellites are capable of capturing, setting the stage for even further expansion of products to customers,” said Gabe Dominocielo, Umbra’s co-founder and president, in a company statement.

The revision to the regulations, put in place in 2020, had been instigated by the Trump administration, and has apparently been left untouched by the Biden administration, at least up until now.

For the satellite companies it means they are much freer to produce that best imagery, and thus compete more successfully. For customers, it means that they will now have access the best imagery, in open competition. For news outlets attempting to report on things like the Ukraine War, for example, this ability will make it possible to improve the accuracy of the coverage.

0 comments

Real pushback: Judge slams Southwest Airlines for violating settlement terms of free-speech court case

1:38 pm

Southwest: Enemy to free speech

Bring a gun to a knife fight: We now come to another chapter in the continuing saga of flight attendant Charlene Carter, who was fired in 2017 by Southwest Airlines because she had expressed opinions that were not liked by both the company and union officials. In 2022 a jury awarded her $5.1 million against the airline and the union.

In December 2022 the federal judge in the case, Brantley Starr, reduced the settlement award to $810,000 in order “to comply with federal limits on punitive damages.” However, he also approved the rest of the jury award, which required Southwest to rehire Carter as well as change its policies that violated the first amendment, and announce these facts publicly to its employees.

Only a month later Carter went back to court, demanding that the judge sanction Southwest for violating settlement terms of her court victory. Not only did the company not admit error to its employees, as required by the settlement, one company-wide memo slandered Carter again, calling her previous communications for which she was fired as “inappropriate, harassing, and offensive.”

Judge Starr yesterday responded to Carter’s demand for relief, slamming Southwest in no uncertain terms.
» Read more

10 comments

Scientists repeat fusion power experiment that produced more energy than spent

10:03 am

For the second time ever, scientists have successfully produced more energy from a fusion power experiment than they spent running the experiment.

Physicists have since the 1950s sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun, but until December no group had been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes — a condition also known as ignition.

Researchers at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who achieved ignition for the first time last year, repeated the breakthrough in an experiment on July 30 that produced a higher energy output than in December, according to three people with knowledge of the preliminary results.

Before you start buying stock in fusion power or believe the glowing praises coming from politicians and government bureaucrats, be warned: This experiment, which cost billions, was only able to produce enough power to run a household iron for about an hour. It will likely take many more billions and decades more of research to scale it up to a viable power system that has any hope of being practical.

19 comments

Rocket Factory Augsburg raises $33 million in private investment capital

8:59 am

The German startup Rocket Factory Augsburg revealed today that it has raised $32.9 million in private investment capital at the same time it has shifted the launch date for the first rocket launch of its RFA-1 rocket from this year into next.

That launch was scheduled to occur at the Shetland spaceport, Saxavord, and as recently as April 2023 officials there were saying that this launch would occur this year. In June however Rocket Factory signed a deal with France’s space agency to use its long abandoned launchpad in French Guiana. That same month I predicted the launch at Saxavord would not happen this year, possibly because of regulatory hurdles in the United Kingdom.

It appears those hurdles might have been part of the reason for Rocket Factory’s deal with France. It needs a place to launch, and it appears the UK’s government is not presently conducive to allowing such things to happen easily.

2 comments

Boeing delays first manned Starliner flight again, until March of 2024

4:21 pm

Because of both parachute and wiring issues in its Starliner capsule, Boeing revealed today that it is delaying the first manned Starliner flight again, until March of 2024, so that it has time to change and test the parachutes as well as remove the flammable tape inside the capsule.

The company had been hoping to finally fly that first manned flight last month, but was forced to cancel when in June it discovered two shocking problems. First the connections between the parachutes and the capsule were too weak, and second, for some reason engineers had used tape to protect the capsule’s wiring that was too flammable and had to be replaced or covered somehow.

Boeing is taking the tape off in places where it’s easy and safe to do so and considering other remediation techniques, such as protective barriers or coatings over it, in trickier spots, Nappi said.

The parachute work is multifaceted as well. For example, Boeing has modified the soft link design to make it stronger, and the new version is being manufactured now, Nappi said. The company also decided to swap out Starliner’s parachute system, putting a new version slated for the first operational mission on board for [the crew flight test]. The new soft links will be incorporated into the new chutes, which will get to strut their stuff during a drop test soon. “We expect that the drop test will occur in mid to late November,” Nappi said. “That’s what the planning indicates at this point, and we’ll watch that closely.”

The seemingly endless number of mistakes and bad engineering that we have seen during the development of Starliner speaks very badly of Boeing in almost every way possible. These last two problems are especially egregious. Neither should have ever happened, and if so should never had been unnoticed until a mere month before launch and years into the project.

It must also be noted that March ’24 is merely a target date. Don’t bet the house on it happening then.

5 comments

Russia launches new GPS-type Glonass satellite

4:02 pm

Russia today used its Soyuz-2 rocket to place a new GPS-type Glonass satellite into orbit, lifting off from its Plesetsk spaceport in the northern Russian.

Apparently this launch resulted in its lower stages falling in areas in Russia not normally used as a drop zone. No word on whether they landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

53 SpaceX (with a launch planned for tonight, live stream here.)
31 China
10 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
6 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 61 to 31, and the entire world combined 61 to 52, while SpaceX by itself leads the world (excluding American companies) 53 to 52.

0 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Chase bank politically cancels the accounts of several doctors, their families, and their employees

1:06 pm

JP Morgan Chase: eager to blacklist you for your opinions

They’re coming for you next: Continuing what increasingly appears to be its bank policy, JP Morgan Chase bank suddenly and without warning or reason recently canceled the bank accounts of several doctors, their families, and their employees, apparently because these doctors don’t abide by the lockdown policies and medical health advice of our government.

JPMorgan Chase is back to debanking. Once again, it’s not providing any explanations. And once again it’s targeting people who dare to question the Left Government/Woke Business conspiracy against liberty. At about the same time, it appears, Chase debanked, without warning, Drs. Syed Haider and Joseph Mercola. Wait, no. Not just them, but also Dr. Mercola’s employees – and his and their families. All without explanation.
» Read more

12 comments
1 … 182 183 184 185 186 … 838